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Fall/Winter 2006 Works in Progress Philadelphia Folklore Project NON-PROFIT ORG. U.S. POSTAGE 735 S. 50th Street PAID Philadelphia, PA 19143 PHILADELPHIA, PA [ 1987 - 2007 ] PERMIT NO. 1449 magazine of the Address service requested magazine of the philadelphia folklore project Volume 19:3 winter 2006-2007 ISSN 1075-0029 G Tibetan mandalas G Hmong culture G Anti-racist zone G Wobbly songlore G Ukrainian weaving Works in progress is the magazine of the Philadelphia Folklore Project, a 20-year-old public interest folklife agency. We work with people and communities in the Philadelphia inside area to build critical folk cultural knowledge, sustain the complex folk and traditional arts of our region, and challenge practices that diminish these local grassroots arts and humanities. To learn more, please visit us: www.folkloreproject.org or call 215.726.1106. 3 From the editor philadelphia folklore project staff 4 We try to be strong: Pang Xiong Editor/PFP Director: Debora Kodish Sirirathasuk Sikoun Associate Director: Toni Shapiro-Phim By Sally Peterson Members’ Services Coordinator: Roko Kawai Designer: IFE designs + Associates The witnessing of patience: Printing: Garrison Printers 8 [ Printed on recycled paper] Losang Samten By Toni Shapiro-Phim philadelphia folklore project board 10 The Big Red Songbook: 100 Years of Wobbly Songlore Linda Goss Germaine Ingram Ife Nii-Owoo Yvette Smalls By Archie Green Ellen Somekawa Dorothy Wilkie Mary Yee Juan Xu 1 2 My art is my passion By Vera Nakonechny we gratefully acknowledge support from: 1 4 What you got to say? Eric G The National Endowment for the Arts, Joselyn’s art which believes that a great nation deserves great arts By Debora Kodish G The William Penn Foundation G Pennsylvania Council on the Arts G Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission G The Humanities-in-the Arts Initiative, administered by The Pennsylvania Humanities Council, and funded principally by the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts G The Philadelphia Cultural Fund G Philadelphia Music Project, a grant program funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts and administered by the University of the Arts G The Pew Charitable Trusts G The Malka and Jacob Goldfarb Foundation G The Samuel Fels Fund G Independence Foundation G The Philadelphia Foundation G Stockton Rush Bartol Foundation G Philadelphia Cultural Management Initiative, a grant program funded by The Pew Front cover: Charitable Trusts and administered Paj ntaub of the by the Drexel University Arts About the extra cover… journey of the Administration Program The Anti-Racist Zone sign Hmong people G and wonderful individual Philadelphia included here was originally from Laos to Folklore Project members produced by Eric Joselyn as Thailand, during G We invite your support: part of a series, created for thank you to all the War. From use by activists convening in the collection of Philadelphia in response to a Pang Xiong tide of Anti-Asian violence Sirirathasuk and immediately put to use Sikoun. Photo: in the streets. 1992 Will Brown from the editor Knowing our place / going on 20 Philadelphia docks were unusual of place with him— by turning in being racially integrated. In his any space at all, wherever The Folklore Project turns 20 this essay on Wobbly songlore in this he finds himself, into a sacred year. One thing we know for sure issue, eminent folklorist Archie space through his art, bringing is that we are just beginners in Green shows what might be us with him. Shaping mandalas, this work. This issue of Works in known of such radical working Losang teaches patience, Progress features writing by and people as Fletcher through the perseverance and a sense of the about people who have been record of the songs they may interconnectedness of all things. engaged for much longer than have sung. What did workers (He will be in residence at the two decades in the cultivation of have to say in these songs? Why Folk Arts Cultural Treasures folklore and local knowledge. did they sing? In what languages? Charter School this winter— These are people devoted to For what causes? Archie’s writing, the school that PFP founded with community, deeply responsible to to be published as the preface to Asian Americans United.) Vera the times and places where they the forthcoming Big Red find themselves. These are Nakonechny’s commitment to Songbook roots PFP in time and reconstructing specific ethnic people who know particulars— place as well, for his lifelong work details of ordinary experience Ukrainian weaving traditions— has paved the way for a public beginning with the traditions and exacting craft— that escape interest folklore agency like ours. the notice of many. Another thing of the Hutsul region where her Artist Eric Joselyn’s handy that we know: this matters a lot. mother was born— has carried reworking of a common street her across three continents, and In one of my favorite books, sign (What rules do we really Wisdom Sits in Places, distinguishes her activities here want to require? What priorities in Philadelphia. She is literally ethnographer Keith Basso writes should the state really follow?) of riding the Arizona landscape helping people re-knit their and his clip-and-use fortune-teller connections to home places with with Apache friends who instruct are 20th anniversary gifts to him about local place-names. her needlework. The ethnic and readers: examples of the kind of tribal patterns were forbidden, Handed-down and “handsomely- playful seriousness with which and dangerous to make, under crafted,” these names (rarely this artist engages the world. A Soviet rule, and much has been found on maps) are fine story retrospective exhibition of Eric’s forgotten. Her work counters prompts. Telling what happened work, “What you got to say?” is this loss. here, making claims and in PFP’s gallery through February. judgments about the history of Adapting folk traditions and These artists remind us: there a place, stories do a great deal popular culture, Eric has found is no lack of important work to of useful work. Some stories tell his place supporting local be done. We register in these about people’s experience, about struggles, and the show is a pages concerns with diminishing foolishness and wisdom. Others sampling of what a range of freedom of expression, literacies, provide guidelines for how to people have had to say, often at patience, local knowledge: all behave, for how to live a good some risk, over the past 25 years core folklore issues here and life. And taken together, these here. In March we will open a now, requiring attention. stories give people intimate second retrospective exhibition. Every day in Philadelphia, folk connections to the places where This one documents a different arts — mandalas, paj ntaub, they dwell. slice of more than 28 years of songs, weavings, slogans, Place-names (and stories about cultural work here, featuring paj demonstrations and more— are them) are disarmingly simple ntaub textiles from the workshop among the resources people use forms of folklore that do powerful of Upper Darby artist Pang Xiong to enact responsibility to one work. They keep us responsible Sirirathasuk Sikoun, who has another and to this place, now to other people and other times. over the decades organized home. Intensely local knowledge, dozens of other Hmong women No less than Apache ranching folklore anchors us to community and kin in stitching versions of families long in a single place, and reminds us what is at stake. Hmong peoples’ experiences. all of these people are experts in These pages share examples of Their changing needleworks tell a kind of local knowledge: they people using folklore to name stories of a remembered know where they stand, and in where they stand, to pay homeland, war and loss, and revealing the details and attention, to work for balance, resettlement. Just as important: complexity of this knowledge, beauty, equity and justice. the needlework has served as an they help us to know where we, In the 1910s and 1920s, under ongoing and reliable resource for too, need to stand. the leadership of Ben Fletcher, negotiating these challenges. — Debora Kodish an African American dockworker One of three immigrant artists and a union organizer for the featured in this issue, exiled International Workers of the Tibetan sand mandala-maker World (Wobblies), the Losang Samten carries his sense 2006-2007 Winter WIP 3 >artist*profile< We try to be strong: try to We Paj ntaub (story cloth) from Pang Xiong Sirirathasuk Sikoun. Photo by Will Brown. Inserts, top to bottom: Pang Xiong and her by Sally Peterson family in Laos, c. 1959. Pang playing a jaw’s harp, with T-Bee Lo. Photo: Jane Levine, 1993. Pang and other Hmong women in the early years of producing paj ntaub for sale here in Philadelphia. Photo: Tom Morton, c. 1990 Pang Xiong Sirirathasuk Sikoun highlands of Laos. Though wearing toddler clothing, so ang Xiong without a written language she must have been about Sirirathasuk Sikoun until the 1950s and the two years old. “I loved my says that she would arrival of Christian spoon, I had my own spoon. like to make a movie missionaries, the Hmong And my little basket for of her life in four retained a highly the back.” parts. Pang Xiong sophisticated oral literature Pang Xiong’s safe, has lived in Philadelphia, and history, and the women insulated Hmong world and devoted herself to excelled in minute and changes in part 2 of her psustaining Hmong culture, delicate forms of embroidery movie with the death of her for more than 28 years now. and appliqué that mother and the constant She and I worked together embellished their clothing. threat of war. Life is on several projects in the In Pang’s movie, the dangerous and difficult.
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